How much does a website cost in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania?

A website is difficult to budget for because the word covers a great deal. It can mean five pages built from one template, or it can mean a system with logins, payments, a stock feed and an administrator who has to be trained. Two proposals that both say "website" can differ by a factor of ten without either of them being dishonest about it.

What actually drives the price

• The number of distinct page types rather than the number of pages. Fifteen pages that share one layout cost far less than five pages that each need their own.
• Content: whether the words, photographs and product information exist and are approved, or have to be written, shot, collected and translated.
• Whether the design is decided. An existing identity can be applied to a new site; a new identity has to be decided first, which is its own piece of work.
• Anything the site has to talk to: payments, an accounting system, stock levels, a CRM, SMS, a courier's tracking page. Integrations are where estimates go wrong, because the other system decides how co-operative it will be.
• Whether there is a content management system, and how many people will use it. Editors with different permissions and approval steps are more work than one person updating a page.
• Migration: what happens to the pages, links and photographs of the site being replaced.

Why the same brief gets different numbers

A lower quotation frequently excludes the parts nobody mentioned: the copy, the photography, redirects from old addresses, accessibility and speed checks, browser and phone testing, or the first year of updates. Those do not disappear; they arrive later, piece by piece, and usually at a higher total. This is why the useful comparison is a written scope rather than a figure — what is included, and just as importantly what is not.

The costs that arrive after launch

• Domain renewal and the security certificate. Small, predictable, and embarrassing when they lapse.
• Hosting, sized for the traffic the site actually receives rather than the traffic it was promised.
• Updates: the software the site runs on changes whether or not the site does.
• Backups, and a restore that somebody has tested rather than assumed.
• Small changes — a new page, a price, a photograph, a phone number — and the question of who makes them and how quickly.
• Testing after a significant change, if the site holds customer data or takes payments.

Budgeting sensibly

• Agree the page list and the copy before arguing about the build. Most of the cost lives in content, not in code.
• Build in stages. A site that launches with the pages that earn their place, and grows, is cheaper and more useful than one that launches late with everything half-finished.
• Decide the support arrangement before launch, while both sides still have something to lose by getting it wrong.
• Ask what happens after the first year, so the decision is about the whole period rather than the first invoice.

We quote per stage against a written scope rather than as one package price, because a package hides the decision that matters most: which pages this business actually needs now. If you would like a figure for a specific site, the quickest route is a short conversation about what yours has to do in the first year — and if fixing what you already have is the cheaper answer, that is what we will say.